Richard Powell
Forum Replies Created
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Thread on this exact subject here. The link you’ll run across to peranders.com has changed since he recently redid his site.
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Whoa, hold the self-righteous indignation! Just ask the question! 🙂 The answer is simple and fundamental: for this you shouldn’t be using splines anyway. Do a sausage with hypernurbs on a converted cube with like 5 segments on the x with the x elongated. If you wanted a tongue-depressor, yes, use splines and extrude. Now for some shocking news…
C4D’s path tools are in fact light-years ahead of Illustrator’s. There’s one bit of clunkiness regarding joining splines and segments that really needs to be fixed, but otherwise C4D is superior–to the point where it makes Adobe seem like slackers for being outfeatured by a 3d app fer chrissakes.
In AI, you can’t manually enter tangent values.
In AI, you can’t do an interactive chamfer (ridiculous that AI lacks this!)
In AI, you can’t do an interactive ‘make outline’/’outline path.’ (also ridiculous!)
In AI, you can’t ‘make equal tangenth length.’
In AI, you don’t have b-spline interpolation, cubic interpolation or akima interpolation.
In AI, you don’t have a symmetry object.
In AI, the layer manager is a catastrophe vis-a-vis C4D’s object manager.
In AI, trying to grab bezier handles can make a balanced person contemplate murder.
In AI, ‘make compound path’ is (arguably) more clumsy than ‘function>connect’ and its inverse buddy, ‘structure>explode segments,’ which are easily assigned keyboard commands.And there are more. In c4d you can’t ‘blend’ without plugins however.
Nonetheless you’ll find that most people import shapes from AI to c4d–this is everyday workflow and having an AI action to do the export is a part of many designers’ toolsets.
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Thanks, Chris! But I’m not close to Adam or the other guys’ class with the app. I don’t have the slightest clue about BP or Dynamics or Cloth. I had hundreds of posts in 2002-2003 before I discovered mograph.net, and every one of them was answering the simple stuff. Most of that is best handled by back-handedly forcing people to do some experimenting, which is how I continue to learn. But thanks for the kind words and yeah, that Traktor spot was the one I was talking about. They were kind of recreating a 3D look by using real-world things–working ass-backwards–which you also see Tronic doing with their live installations (see upcoming mograph.net interview in a few weeks for more on that).
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This look is big-time popular right now–it was used midde of last year in a Dr. Pepper commercial using the old ‘Spy vs. Spy’ characters.
The fast setup, slow render method is stochastic radiosity with a high sample count, because there isn’t see much grain in that shot. And I mean sloooow rendering.
Or the fast render/slow setup way, a light dowm. Search CGTalk for examples of that. There are two good ones that are XPresso based that I know of.
Lots of good radiosity guys here however among the mods, do what one of them says if one of them says anything. Adam and Arndt have each written on the subject–Arndt in his book devoted a whole chapter to it.
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Wha…? Subdivide by 6? Create the shape point-by-point? Don’t worry about triangles?
Firewireflow: I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all, but you’d do well to ignore the previous message in its entirety. Function>Subdivide a simple 1x1x1 cube by six, and you end up with 24,576 polygons–whee! Not to mention the time-waste of creating point-by-point. Almost sounds like a Red-Headed League boondoggle.
Okay, that twist is what’s known as ‘gimbal’–google that term for explanation as it will come up again and again no matter what 3d app you use. The paid version of Path Deformer solves this using ‘up vectors’–I highly recommend purchasing it if you’re going to be doing these kinds of things. It’s an essential for motion graphics now.
The way to solve this in the non-free version is to construct your path rotated 90 degrees on one of the axes. Alternatively you might try rotating the axes of the spline and the PD object itself. You have to play around to get it right. But the answer is that it’s always going to happen at some point with complex paths unless you have the full Path Deformer.
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I think Aaron’s trying with one window across two monitors, which I don’t think works. Do it with two palettes using Window>layout>new group window and populate it with things like the Object Manager, Attributes Manager, Coordinates, Materials with some room left over to dock your favorite plugins.
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Frame numbers, yes with Xpresso. Wire a Time node’s ‘frame’ output to the ‘Text’ input of a text spline. Put this in an Extrude nurbs with zero ‘movement’ so that it’s caps only. Child that to your camera if your camera is moving. Probably also possible with the Heads-up Display.
To cancel a preview, hit make preview again, then hit cancel. Give ‘make preview’ a keystroke (it’s command-r for me) and make your life easier.
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You’re in luck. Your *exact* situation is described by paulselhi in his excellent PFrag tutorial–right down to the Pyrocluster. Re Pyrocluster, if you have the render iron, PC is pro quality. However you do it, you’ll be tweaking a lot of parameters, including the ones that get rid of the spherishness of PC. My hint from using it a very little is that ‘self shadowing’ is worth the major render hit it carries with it.
https://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/tutorial/pfragtut1/pfragtut1.zip
Then of course there’s the idea of just comping in flame footage, for which search your favorite online bookstore for the Stu Moschwitz AE book.
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Not so secret if they’re in the manual, eh? LOL.
R1, C1 etc., that’s exactly right. Thanks.